The phrase "a rough copy" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used to refer to an initial draft or version of a document that is not yet finalized or polished.
Example: "Before submitting the final report, please send me a rough copy for review."
Alternatives: "a draft version" or "an initial draft".
But that afternoon, Mat sent us a rough copy of what he had been working on.
The Court of Appeals acknowledged that the "coincidence of a number of lines would raise a question of fact whether Winkelman, using a tracing method, made a rough copy of portions of plaintiff's drawings".
"They [artists] would be given a subject or location and produce a rough copy, mostly in watercolour, which would ultimately by lithographically transferred to a poster.
Instead, Congress gives NASA $100 million to pursue the development of Landsat-9 as a rough copy of its predecessor, which launched in 2013.
Draft a rough copy and then make a few different versions.
We did a rough copy and let Tommy Mottola hear it and he loved it, so all we had to do was bring it back in and mix it.
After studying engineering at the Sorbonne in Paris, Esnault-Pelterie built his first glider, a very rough copy of the Wright glider of 1902 but constructed without an understanding of the Wright brothers' control system.
As Richard Ford shrewdly notes, each ballgame is in some sense a repetition anyway, or rough copy, of the Ideal Game that already exists platonically in the rule book.
While the record label was devoting its energy into carving out soul hits for Ella Henderson, a teenager from Grimsby with an earnest ambition to become Aretha FRoughin-lite, Rough Copy were railroaded into the pop mish-mash of their first single, Street Love – a clunker of ill-chosen Anita Baker samples and synths nicked from Skrillex's dustbin.
Still, there is hope for the future: Ajobe now hopes to emulate the success of grime acts who have broken into the mainstream on their own terms: Rough Copy are seeking an independent route to success by creating a fanbase outside of mainstream channels.
Having breezed through the 2013 competition with a line in slick R&B jams, the Rough Copy trio bowed out in the semi-finals before landing a deal with Epic Records.
